Professor Yanis Ben Amor is the Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Climate School at Columbia University. He is an Assistant Professor of Global Health and Microbiological Sciences and a former member of the Secretariat of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission.
Prof. Ben Amor has over 20 years of research experience developing digital tools for Education and Health.
In Education, Professor Ben Amor led programs in Uganda and India to develop and allow access to Social and Emotional Learning curricula to children and adolescents. He has created mental health programs for school children in low-resource settings, and Digital Education tools to monitor children’s school absenteeism in India using fingerprint technology.
In Health, Professor Ben Amor has developed digital tools for tuberculosis patients to facilitate their adherence, for HIV-positive mothers to help them prevent vertical transmission of the virus, for malaria control programs to monitor use of resources for an effective control strategy, and more recently, for Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan to provide health information and healthcare access.
Prof. Ben Amor is currently working on several projects involving Artificial Intelligence, as part of a digital application providing health access to vulnerable populations in Low-and-Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), and to combat disinformation on Climate Change in Brazil, among others. Prof. Ben Amor has also launched an initiative to study the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Future of Work and Education, with a particular focus on LMICs.
